AN ENTICING MARKET STORY
- OR WHY DID VOX POPULI RESEARCH PROGRAMS GAIN POPULARITY IN AUDIO TOO?
“
Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”.
John Maynard Keynes
In 1951, Milton Friedman, the economist and Nobel laureate, wrote:
“If these judgments are correct, we are currently at one of these periods when what Dicey called the “cross-currents” of public opinion are at a maximum, a period at which underlying opinion is confused, vague, and chaotic. The same beliefs are still largely held by the same people, but there is no longer the same unthinking acceptance of them. Stubbornness and unwillingness to relinquish a faith once blindly held are taking the place of fanaticism. The stage is set for the growth of a new current of opinion to replace the old, to provide the philosophy that will guide (…) the next generation even though it can hardly affect those of this one.
Ideas have little chance of making much headway against a strong tide; their opportunity comes when the tide has ceased running strong but has not yet turned. This is, if I am right, such a time, and it affords a rare opportunity to those of us who believe (…) to affect the new direction the tide takes. We have a new faith to offer; it behooves us to make it clear to one and all what that faith is”.
Source:
https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/friedman_images/Collections/2016c21/Farmand_02_17_1951.pdf
The title of Friedman’s article was “Neo-liberalism and its prospects”. Central to “the new faith” was, and still is, the Weltanschauung that “”the market” is posited to be an information processor more powerful than any human brain, but essentially patterned on brain/computation metaphors” (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009).
Though Galton wrote his essay on vox populi in 1907, his “evidence” (the median contestant guessed the ox weight with an error margin of almost zero) didn’t gain immediate foothold in society. An indication of how long it takes to “affect the new direction the tide takes”, for the “current opinion to replace the old”, is the fact that Surowiecki’s bestseller “The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations” was published in 2004, about one hundred years after Galton (1907) and 50 years after Friedman (1951). The curios and skeptical observer may start to ask when “stubbornness and unwillingness to relinquish a faith once blindly held are taking the place of fanaticism” will once again describe what used to be the new way of thinking 100 and 50 years back in time, but which has become the new Old in the meantime.
Is it just coincidence that the “gold standard” in audio is a research program that is built upon vox populi? Can the prevailing hegemony of vox populi based research be linked to the hegemony of market-oriented thought in modern society? Or is audio science an island of isolation where Truth prevails in a paradise of intellectual peace? Is audio science “exempt from any intellectual influence”?
The contemporary audio researcher resorts to vox populi and expects a spontaneous order of speaker characteristics, i.e. the self-organization, a spontaneous order from chaos, based on prior characteristics of the population and the goods under study, and based on an algorithm that was set prior to the study. Out of confusion comes order, until the designer of the market of speaker characteristics decides to change method and/or data, for a never-ending tweaking of perfect speaker characteristics.
There are a couple of terms above I would like to dwell over, in order to make the Keynes quote on "some academic scribbler of a few years back", "madmen in authority", "slaves" and "practical men" more visibly relevant for the science interested reader who is fascinated by vox populi in audio research. Hayek said that “[o]rder is an indispensable concept for the discussion of all complex phenomena, in which it must largely play the role the concept of law plays in the analysis of simpler phenomena”.
Mapping out the perfect speaker characteristics is a discussion of “complex phenomena, right? What did Hayek mean by “order”?
Order is “[a] state of affairs in which a multiplicity of elements of various kinds are so related to each other that we may learn from our acquaintance with some spatial or temporal part of the whole to form correct expectations concerning the rest, or at least expectations which have a good chance of proving correct. There is an order to a state of affairs, then, when it is possible to make more-or-less accurate predictions about how it will behave on the basis of “macro"-level information”.
The implication is that by designing a market of speaker characteristics through listening tests and manipulating the population of the test to fit a predetermined target shape, perfections of (unspecified) loudspeakers and (unspecified) rooms are uncovered. It is an enticing market story.
(A much more funny version is
@Cosmik ‘ s constructed dialogue:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...for-discourse-on-asr.8212/page-14#post-210475).
Some historians of thought have started to ask the economist: If you control the design of the market, don’t you control the outcome as well?
Is the pensée unique in audio primarily an enticing market story?
Are there «some academic scribbler of a few years back», «madmen in authority», «slaves» and «practical men» in audio too?